


Five, four, three, two, one

by krystallisert



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: + lev, F/M, Florist!Reader - Freeform, Gore, Horror, Minor Character Death, No Fluff, kuroo and kenma are detectives, please suspend your disbelief, serial killer au, the author doesn't know shit about shit, tsukki and yams as forensics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-10-26 16:55:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10790787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krystallisert/pseuds/krystallisert
Summary: Kenma knows, as soon as he arrives at the scene, that something big is happening.ORthe florist!reader serial killer AU kenma fic that no one asked for(and that the author did NOT think of a cool summary for)





	Five, four, three, two, one

**Author's Note:**

> mind the tags, this is not a happy story
> 
> this has been in the works for a LONG ass time and i'm very happy to be able to post it now. everything is planned and outlined, but i'm very very busy, so i'm not 100% on a schedule. (it's not really as if i could KEEP an actual schedule anyways, lmao.)
> 
> big fucking thanks to foxkindle/tskshm-k, who basically saved this plot from a fiery death of going into the trashbin, at this point i'm just scared to completely butcher all your great ideas, you magnificent, amazing person. also to M, who listened to me plot out the very early and shitty stages of the fic (which, it was BAD, guys), and to I, who won't ever read this because she barely knows what anime is, but who kept sending me any and all article about serial killers she could find to help me out and looked over this and gave me a lot of good ideas despite not knowing any of the characters. a shoutout, too, to sabbywrites, who made me motivated again by gushing about how awesome gore is, because i was literally considering cutting the gore (and it's pretty 'lite' in this chapter, tbh) out of the story out of fear that people would dislike it. soo, if you DO dislike it, blame her.

_[People will have many firsts in their lives; first day of school, first broken bone, first kiss. You never forget that moment; whether it's a good first or a bad first, it stays with you, shapes you.  
  
__Here's a first I'll always treasure: My first kill.  
  
__Her name's Hitoka Yachi. It's important to have a name to put to the faces, to remember that these are people, too. With their own ambitions and dreams and firsts. And lasts.  
  
__Yachi's a nice girl, in every sense of the word. She has a lot of friends and a promising career and she has probably never even hurt a fly. I found her randomly, overhearing a conversation between her and her friends. 'You're such a mom,' they'd told her, and they'd all laughed. And I just knew. I had fantasized about how I'd do it; how I'd pick out a candidate and follow them around for a bit, learning their habits and find the opportune moment to strike. Yachi made it easy. She's extensively active on social media – a dangerous thing, with so many monsters lurking around every corner – and the more I found out about her, the more confident I grew in my choice. She really is 'such a mom'. Such a_ good _mom.  
  
__This is how it happens: It's late. She's walking home from a date. It went well; they exchanged numbers and made promises to see each other again. She's happy, walking with that extra bit of spring in her step, maybe even humming a little. Too bad about the humming – though a sign of joy, generally a way of expressing that something good has or is about to happen, she should've stayed quiet on this particular night. You see, there's someone walking behind her, but she can't hear that. Because she's humming.  
  
__That's her first mistake. These are very dangerous times, one should always be alert.  
  
__Here's her second one: Never trust a stranger.]  
  
  
_**5.30 AM: CRIME SCENE  
  
** Kenma knows, as soon as he arrives at the scene, that something big is happening. For the last few months, his work has consisted of messy divorces and unfaithful husbands, so when Kuroo calls him at five am in the morning and practically begs him to come down to the local park near Kenma’s apartment, Kenma _knows_. He hasn’t been on a murder case in forever, but he knows how it looks, how it sounds. The scene is covered with cops, flashlights and murmurs, but it’s quiet. The kind of eerie silence that blankets a place when people just don’t know what to say, overwhelmed by the fact that somewhere nearby, there’s a corpse. Someone who stopped living possibly just a mere few hours ago. You never get used to it, not really, and Kenma pulls his too big jacket closer around himself. The sun is just barely peeking out from behind the tall buildings around him and the air is cold.  
  
Kenma’s best friend and colleague, Tetsurou Kuroo, stands by his car furiously tapping on his phone. This either means he’s arguing with the forensics guy again, or that he’s playing Angry Bird. Kenma doesn’t know which one he would prefer at the moment.  
  
As Kenma gets closer, he notices how haggard the older male looks. Kuroo always looks like he’s just rolled out of bed, it’s basically been his signature look since middle school, but in the early morning light and with the distinct look of tragedy etched into his features, Kuroo looks like he hasn’t slept in _weeks_. The tall man has always been very particular about the work dress code; never leaving home looking less than pristine. Off-duty, Kuroo favors flannel and leather jackets and jeans that are more holes than they are pants, but at work, he looks immaculate; nice blazers, ties and denim pants. This morning, his tie is crooked, his hair is more of a mess than usual and his jeans are ripped. He looks like someone who got a bad call in the middle of the night. When Kenma approaches, Kuroo finally glances up from his phone, nods and puts his phone in the back-pocket of his pants without a word.  
  
Usually, Kuroo is the one who favors working on police cases. Despite Kenma’s derogatory thoughts towards his recent clientele of suspicious wives and cheating husbands, he finds it easier to work independently, and prefers to stay emotionally detached. He doesn’t care about divorces, most of the time, and the times he can help someone get out of a shitty marriage without unleashing any sort of rage from either party feels like a win. And he has other cases, too; disappearances and frauds and stuff that makes him feel less like a downgraded divorce lawyer and more like the detective he actually is. Kuroo, on the other hand, likes the thrill of publicity. He works with the police more often than not, knows a lot of names and has a lot of perks. He's somehow gotten on first name basis with the chief of police, meaning he has free reign on any and all of the police's cases. Some, Kenma has heard, calls him a lapdog. Kenma knows better. He sometimes wonders why Kuroo decided to become a private eye instead of working directly with the police. And then a case like this happens.  
  
“Hitoka Yachi,” He tells Kenma by way of greeting. “Twenty-six years old. Her chest cavity has been opened completely and several organs are missing.” He talks quickly, looks a bit queasy, and when the raven-haired man takes out a pack of cigarettes, Kenma knows his friend is stressed. For all his bad boy platitudes and ‘rugged good looks’, Kuroo takes every death he works on very hard. Kenma will never forget how much of a mess Kuroo was after his first murder case, how worried they all were. He’s doing a lot better now, which is why Kenma bites back a comment about cigarettes and bad smell; he much prefers the occasional smoke over binge-drinking and disappearing for days. Kuroo likes excitement and he genuinely want to singlehandedly bring the crime rates to zero, but he can’t keep it up for long.  
  
“Anything else?” Kenma watches as Kuroo inhales, reluctantly fascinated with the flicks and flares of the cigarette. The taller man looks him over, mutters something about how Kenma needs to get a haircut. This is routine. Kenma will show up with his hair in a ponytail - or a bun if he’s been particularly stressed that day - and Kuroo will scoff, tell him he looks like a hippie. Kenma will hum noncommittally, play with the ends of his hair and neglect to mention that someone told him he looked good with longer hair and that he now refuses to cut it.  
  
“Yeah, come on,” Kuroo says at last, throws his cigarette on the ground and stomps on it and earns himself a glare and a frown from his shorter friend that he seems to ignore completely. “It’s better if you just see it for yourself."  
  
Kenma has seen dead people before. He has seen heads blown off and bodies filled with bullet holes. He's seen suicides and accidents and murders both in real life and on television, but he's never seen something quite like this:  
  
Her chest has been opened with a sharp object, her rib cage forcefully torn open and removed if the state of her chest is anything to go by, and the chest cavity is filled to the brim with a bunch of modest plants with purple flowers. The upper part of her body has been stripped bare, but she's still wearing her bloodstained jeans and footwear. Kenma tucks this detail into the back of his brain, temporarily crossing sexual molestation off his mental checklist. The girl's – Hitoka Yachi's, he corrects himself – head is adorned with a flower crown made up of pink flowers that Kenma recognizes as carnations and vines wrap around her neck like a necklace.  
  
It’s one of those things that would have been fascinating if it wasn’t real. If it had been an episode of NCIS he would have thought ‘okay. A bit over the top, but I’ll take it’, and he would have stayed on the channel, even during commercials. But it’s real. In the middle of the park he played in as a child and spent lazy afternoons in as an adult, carefully laid down on the vibrant, green grass, there’s a dead woman. A dead woman with missing organs and bloodied clothes. There’s a police woman right by the body, taking pictures and looking increasingly green in the face, two uniformed men scouting the area with flashlights a few feet away and the birds are starting to wake up, filling the air with cheery chirps that doesn’t at all fit the somber vibes of a crime scene. The city is waking up, too, observers few and far between but still present. They need to act fast, get the body back to forensics.  
  
“She wasn't killed here,” Kenma looks around the scene. The park looks like it did when he walked past it last week; flowers blooming and swing-set swinging idly in the breeze, not a speck of blood or sign of struggle as far as he can see in the limited light he has to work with.  
“Nope. She was moved here, recently. Found by a guy who was out jogging,” Kuroo says and gestures towards a cop and a tall man in a jogging outfit, the cop writing notes on a legal pad and the jogger pointedly not looking in the direction of the corpse. “No blood, and the flowers are still fresh, she hasn't been here for long.”  
“How'd you ID her?”  
“Her wallet.” Kuroo responds, finally pulling his pack of smokes back out of his pocket and fishing out another cigarette.  
“Anything else in the wallet?” The younger male asks, jotting down notes in his head; Kenma never saw the need for notebooks or legal pads, he prefers keeping information close to his chest. Kuroo scoffs, a huff of smoke bursting out of his mouth with the sound and forming lazy clouds that evaporate slowly, slowly into the morning light. He arches an eyebrow when he looks down at Kenma again.  
“I think it's pretty safe to say that this wasn't a robbery gone wrong.”  
  
Kenma is inclined to agree.  
  
“You know,” Kuroo says after a brief silence. His fingers twitch in the pocket of his jacket, as if he's itching to pull out another cigarette. Bad sign, Kenma notes. “This really reminds me of that killer that was around when we were kids.” Kenma stares at the body, then back at Kuroo. Kuroo looks tired. Everyone always talks about how Kuroo seemingly hasn't aged a day since college, but he suddenly looks like he's aged a decade in the short span of time that they've spent in front of the body of a girl who looks like she could have been a classmate.  
  
“She looks nice,” Kuroo murmurs. “She looks like she was a nice person.”  
  
  
_[Yachi wakes up in a dimly lit room.  
  
__She begs. That's fine, it's the natural response to being tied up in a stranger's basement, after all. She'll do anything I want. Do I want money? She has money, just please let her go. She won't tell a soul. It's silly, but kind of endearing. I'm thankful that I had the forethought to soundproof the basement.  
  
__I ask her questions. What's your family like? What's your mother's name? Who was your first kiss with? She responds, voice quivering and tears running; she's the closest with her mother, who is nice and loves her a lot, but can act very cold at times. Her mother's name is Madoka and_ please don't hurt her _, she says. I won't, I assure her truthfully; she doesn't sound like a good fit. Her first kiss was with a girl in high school named Shimizu, who she still thinks about sometimes.  
  
__What am I going to do to her, she asks. Why her? She's hyperventilating, less and less coherent by the second. To be frank, I'm getting pretty tired of the crying and blabbering, so I tell her like it is; I'm going to kill you. She knew it was coming, she must have, and it shuts her right up. The silence is heavy. Will it hurt, she asks after a moment. There's no more fight in her voice, like she's been completely drained. She gives up quickly, resigns herself to her fate. It's sort of pathetic, but it makes things easier for me. And for her, by extension.  
  
__I don't know, I tell her. She whimpers when the syringe pierces her skin, and then she goes completely still. A tear hits the back of my latex glove when she slumps forward in the chair. I lick it away.  
  
__Tastes like salt.]  
  
  
_**4.34 PM: KENMA'S OFFICE  
  
** Eleven hours later, the body has been moved and brought to Tsukishima and Yamaguchi for autopsy, Yachi's friends and family has been notified and questioned, the murder is all over the news (the headline; 'BOTANIST KILLER BACK AFTER 15 YEARS?!', makes Kenma's head hurt) and both detectives have consumed an unhealthy amount of caffeine.  
  
Kenma's office, a small space he rented ages ago and perpetually forgets to decorate, is silent. Kuroo is, once again, tapping away on his phone, checking headlines and – when he thinks Kenma isn't looking – browsing social media. Kenma twirls a lock of hair around his finger, stares at the images on his computer screen. Yachi was choked to death, that much they know by now. After removing the flowers and vines from her body they found a few things; blunt force was used to destroy her rib cage before filling it with the purple flower they have yet to identify, and her neck is full of purple marks that resemble those of strangulation. No fingerprints, but Kenma isn't surprised about that. Despite the mess that was made of her chest cavity, the murder seems calculated and well thought out, right down to the number of flowers in her hollowed-out chest and the location of the body. Whoever killed Yachi wanted her to be found, and quickly.  
  
Notes from the interviews with the deceased's closest friends and family are also attached, but they yield little information. She was, as Kuroo had lamented on the scene, a nice girl. No debts to speak of, no enemies or notable fights in the recent past. On the way to become a nurse, good grades all throughout school, not even a speeding ticket on her record. As far as Kenma can see, there’s no motive. She hasn’t been raped, or even touched in any other context than the murder itself, and Kenma is at a loss. After interviewing the guy she’d been on a date with the night of the murder, they probably even lost their closest thing to a suspect; the boy had gone straight home to his roommate and the two of them had spent the night chatting together.  
  
In short, Kenma’s headache is not getting better.  
  
“I can't believe he's this late,” Kuroo snickers from his seat opposite Kenma, finally having regained color in his face and some of his usual cocky flair after his fifth red bull. Kenma is glad to see it, but he frowns at the mention of Kenma’s assistant/coworker/personal guard dog. The boy is late more often than not, and exceedingly clumsy, but Kenma knows he means well and works hard, so he lets it slide. He’s going to have to reprimand him when he finally does show up. Kuroo’s going to laugh at him. Kenma’s frown deepens.  
  
As if on cue, the door flies open, and in rushes a freakishly tall and gangly Russian.  
  
Lev Haiba is, for all intents and purposes, a good detective. His friendly demeanor seems to put people at ease in a way Kenma could only dream of achieving, and despite his goofy attitude and perpetual tardiness, he takes his job seriously. If pressed, Kenma would say that he respects his silver haired colleague.  
  
“Sorry! I overslept!” Lev exclaims upon arrival, causing both Kenma and Kuroo to look down at their watches to confirm that yes, it’s in fact five in the afternoon. Lev grins, hands Kenma his coffee - Kenma would like to go on record and say that he has never once asked for him to bring him coffee, or even told his colleague how he likes his coffee, but Lev does it every day anyways - and explains that he’s still jetlagged from his flight from “The Motherland” (absolutely Lev’s words, not Kenma’s).  
  
To his credit, Lev has for once managed to find a pair of pants that fit his impossibly long legs and a clean, business casual-y shirt, and looks more professional than both Kenma (who by now is ready to topple over, wearing a giant sweater that may or may not be from a video game and has pulled his hair in a very messy bun at the back of his head) and Kuroo (who has given up all pretenses about not being on Twitter, keeps pulling threads in his pants and making the hole at the knee bigger and bigger and who Kenma is pretty sure he saw literally twitching a moment ago) combined.   
“Yuck,” the youngest detective mutters once he steps behind Kenma’s chair and leans over to glance over the report. Kuroo looks up from his phone, grimaces.  
  
“Welcome home.”  
  
  
**5.45 PM: FORENSICS  
  
** At five thirty in the afternoon, Kuroo finally gets the okay to go visit Tsukishima and Yamaguchi at the forensics lab, and the three detectives cram themselves into Kuroo’s car - some with more difficulty than others - after a quick debrief for Lev’s sake. Kuroo is strangely peppy for someone who’s about to go check out an autopsy, which makes Kenma want to roll his eyes and Lev chuckle. Tsukishima, the head of forensics, and Kuroo has this weird thing going on where they constantly argue (Kuroo calls it ‘banter’) and look like they’re inches away from beating each other up, but as soon as Kenma and Kuroo leave, Kuroo starts talking about how good friends they are and how much he enjoys visiting. It’s one of those things Kenma always can count on, and while he usually finds it sort of tedious, he could really go for some normalcy right about now.  
  
Sure enough, as soon as they step out of the car, Lev bumping his head the roof of the car and Kenma fearing that the whole thing would fall apart with the impact, they’re met with Kei Tsukishima’s cold glare and his partner Tadashi Yamaguchi’s infinitely more friendly wave.  
  
“How nice of you to greet us by the door, Tsukki!” Kuroo snickers, to which Tsukishima only rolls his eyes and Yamaguchi grins.   
“Couldn’t have you getting lost in the halls,” Tsukishima replies curtly before quickly addressing the other two detectives with polite nods. He opens the door and enters the station without further ado, leaving Yamaguchi to hold the door open for the three detectives. The walk through the halls is quiet, most of the staff busy with collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses or on other cases. On a day like this, it’s almost eerie.  
  
“Scary stuff, huh? Haven’t been on a case like this in forever,” Yamaguchi sounds weirdly unaffected saying this, which makes Kenma look him over. Yamaguchi is the puppy of the forensics lab, known to get sort of queasy at the rough cases. There’s a rumor that he passed out the first time he worked on a murder, but the freckled man vehemently denies this. Tsukishima won’t say a word on the matter, it’s kind of an urban myth at this point. To be sure, his fingers are fidgety; playing with the buttons on his lab coat and twirling the ends of his shaggy hair, and the smile on his face looks more than a nervous reflecs than one of his genuine ones, but Yamaguchi looks otherwise like he always does. Tsukishima, of course, looks blank.  
  
“So what have you got?”   
“Not much yet, to be honest,” Yamaguchi confesses, looking slightly apologetic.   
“I told you to wait until tomorrow,” Tsukishima adds, shooting Kuroo a dirty glare. Kuroo shrugs. Kenma is not surprised.   
“Just give us the rundown on what you have so far,” Lev suggests with a disarming smile and the same pleasant tone he uses when talking to witnesses, eager to defuse the argument that seems to be brewing between Tsukishima and Kuroo. This is why Kenma is always happy to have his tall colleague with him when they go to forensics; Lev is much better at stealing the attention than Kenma is. Yamaguchi seems more than willing to take the lead, nodding to himself as he opens the door to the lab, signalling for the lot of them to enter.  
  
Kenma, unlike both of his colleagues, hates going to forensics. The body they found earlier that morning lies under a white cover in the middle of the room, and it smells sterile, like the room’s been scrubbed from floor to roof in some sort of disinfectant. The flowers found on the body are safely tucked away in another end of the room, and one of the walls is full of x-rays and pictures of the body. Tsukishima is standing near the body, a handful of notes in his hand, and Yamaguchi hums and touches his chin as if contemplative.  
  
“The flowers. They’re probably some kind of signature,” He says at last, glancing over at the metal container where the flowers have been placed for the time being. They’re already starting to wither, the pink of the carnations turning muted, the green of the unknown plant turning brown at the edges. It’s grotesquely poetic in a way, that the flowers started to rot once they got removed from the body, as if they were feeding on the corpse. Of course, Kenma knows that they would have withered anyways, that if they hadn’t found the body when they did, the flowers would have looked a lot less vibrant. The killer must have known that people walk by that park early, must have anticipated the police to find the body quickly.  
  
“Kenma, you should-” Kuroo begins, forcing Kenma out of his train of thought, but Kenma knows where this is going and cuts him off rather abruptly.  
“No.”  
“What’s this about?” Yamaguchi asks, innocent curiosity clear in his eyes, and Kenma scrambles to come up with a quick lie, only to be beaten to the punch by Lev, who is seemingly tired of not being a part of the conversation.  
“They know a florist,” He chimes in unhelpfully, oblivious to Kenma glaring daggers at him.   
“We’re not involving her in a murder case, Kuroo,” He chooses to ignore the tall Russian, pointedly staring at Kuroo instead. Kuroo shrugs, muttering something that sounds like ‘she’d probably like it if you asked her’, but Kenma ignores that too, uncomfortable with the way they’re all staring at him. He might be nearing his thirties, might be grown up and used to it by now, but he never could stand being the center of attention. Tsukishima, bless his cold, dead heart, seems to notice and throws Kenma a proverbial bone.  
  
“The murder itself is clumsy,” he says, ignoring the previous conversation completely. “There are traces of opioids in her system, but it seems like she woke up midway through the killer opening up her chest. The asphyxiation is what killed her in the end. Let’s just say the person who did this have next to zero medical knowledge.” It never ceases to amaze Kenma how unbothered Tsukishima looks when talking about the dead people lying on his table, and if he hadn't known that both Yamaguchi and Tsukishima see a therapist every week, he would be sort of concerned.  
  
“But the flowers are immaculate,” Yamaguchi continues. “We don’t know really anything about symbolism and flowers, but if you know a florist-”  
Any guesses about the killer?” Kenma cuts him off, ignoring Yamaguchi's bewildered and confused reaction to the abrupt subject-change.  
“I, uh, it's still too early to say,” Yamaguchi falters, glances over at his partner. Tsukishima sighs, pushes his glasses further up his nose.  
“I'm sure you recognize the MO, it's very similar to a serial killer that disappeared years ago; the Botanist.” The Botanist was before Kenma's time, active during his childhood and early teens, but he remembers. How could he not? A notorious killer with flashy techniques and an impressive body count; almost as fascinating as he was terrifying, it was like something straight out of a crime novel. “There are some glaring differences, though, mainly the finesse of the murder itself. The safest bet this early on is a copycat.”  
  
Kuroo and Kenma look at each other almost simultaneously. Copycats are never good news. Copycats lack the same motive that the original criminals had, they do it for the recognition, attention, as a show of devotion to the original killer, but they don’t personally care about their targets. A copycat that manages to not leave fingerprints or make any visible mistakes is like a ghost. A ghost with a penchant for flowers, it seems, but a ghost nonetheless.  
  
“She was alive when her chest got torn open?” Kuroo finally asks after a long moment of silence. His eyes are firmly planted on the white sheet covering Hitoka Yachi’s body and his mouth is grim. Kenma feels a shudder down his spine when both Yamaguchi and Tsukishima nod, neither of them saying anything. Kenma can’t blame them. Lev drags long fingers through his neatly combed hair, exhales deeply.   
“She must have been in a lot of pain.”  
  
No one says anything after that.  
  
  
_[It's a lot messier than I had somehow imagined it would be. She wakes up halfway through it and just_ screams _. In the end, I have to strangle her to shut her up, leaving ugly, purple marks around her slender neck. It’s not what I planned, it’s a stain that somehow cheapens the whole act, I’ll have to do better next time. Practice makes perfect, after all, and I am not a doctor. Opening up someone’s chest without making a mess might have been a too-ambitious feat for my first time. I should have something ready for the next time, a sock in the mouth might do the trick.  
  
__The basement is quiet once the girl stops breathing completely, the only sound echoing through the room is the low drips and drops of blood hitting the floor. Yachi is like a ragdoll in my chair, skin paling, lines of red, red liquid spreading in the fabric of her clothing. Her ribcage makes a pleasant crack when it snaps and then I have a clear view of her organs. Lungs, liver, kidney. I don’t care about those, they go right in the bag of trash to be burned. Once her chest cavity has been carefully cleaned out, I have a clear view of the prize; the heart. That one I’ll treasure.  
  
__Once I’ve extracted Yachi’s heart from her still body, the room is bloodied and her skin is eerily pale. I clean her off, brush her hair. The strangle marks are unfortunate, but I can make it work. First, pink carnations. My mother used to love flower crowns, she’d always have this serene smile on her face as she made them. I never really got the appeal, but as I’m sitting in my basement with Yachi silent beside me in her chair, I think I understand. There’s something calming about braiding the stems of the flowers together, watching something beautiful come of it. Once I’m done, I place the crown on top of Yachi’s head, tilt her head slightly back to get a good look at her. She looks beautiful. I allow myself a moment to appreciate my handiwork, but then I get up.  
  
__There’s still a lot more work to do.]  
  
  
_**7.00 PM: CRIME SCENE  
  
** They return to the crime scene again before splitting up that evening. The site is finally empty; devoid of corpses and policemen, but still covered in the barricade tape the first officers on the scene had put up to keep people out. Lev steps over, and subsequently almost trips in, the tape, too engrossed in the scene in front of him to watch his feet. Lev has this uncanny ability to never let anything get to him, he’s remained the same jovial-to-the-point-of-annoying guy in any case he and Kenma has been on together. Unlike Kuroo, who jumps between depressed and hopped up on junk-food and caffeine, and Kenma, who never really lets on whether or not he’s affected by anything, Lev manages to handle himself just fine. He might be somewhat of an idiot, but Kenma sometimes thinks the russian is the most emotionally balanced out of the three of them.  
  
“I kinda have a bad feeling about this one,” Lev finally says, having surveyed the area for a while. There’s a twinge of something serious in his voice, something that Kenma rarely hears and that makes him uneasy. “Better catch this guy sooner rather than later,” he adds, and then the confident smile slides back and Kuroo releases a sigh of relief. At least some things never change.   
“Yeah,” Kenma agrees, watches as Kuroo yawns, takes his phone out of his pocket and check the time. He’s suddenly reminded that Kuroo’s probably been awake for far too long, that he himself got up way too early, that neither of them have eaten anything substantial the whole day.  
  
“Let’s call it a day,” he says, looking at his own watch. Kuroo nods and Lev takes out his phone, a glint in his eyes telling Kenma that he’s gotten a text from his friend, Yaku.   
“That’s fine, I have to meet someone anyways,” he tells them, confirming Kenma’s suspicions.   
“Yeah, I need to get some shut-eye, I’ll contact the chief Ushijima in the morning,” Kuroo mutters. Lev hums, puts his phone back in his pocket and waves them both goodbye with a pleasant ‘see you tomorrow’. He manages to tangle his leg in the barricade tape on his way from the scene, stumbles awkwardly a few steps before he even realizes it, and looks back at Kenma and Kuroo with a grin too confident for someone who can’t even step over some tape without almost toppling over.  
  
“I really think you should give her a call,” Kuroo repeats for what feels like the thousandth time since they left the forensics lab. They both watch Lev’s retreating back; his frame mostly covered in shadows and his jacket blowing in the wind gives a sort of creepy vibe that makes Kenma shiver. They’re standing on a crime scene, after all, and despite the lack of a body, the blond feels uneasy. Kuroo clears his throat, looks at Kenma. He seems to be waiting for a response. Kenma shrugs. “She’s not only _your_ contact, I’m friends with her, too” Kuroo adds with a meaningful glance, and the implications make Kenma uncomfortable. He sighs.    
  
“I’ll sleep on it.”  
  
  
****_[Gardening really is about nurturing. You have to treat your garden with care; find the right spots for the right plants, check up on the soil often, be careful not to water too much or too little.  
  
__The body is much the same. A flower cannot grow to its full potential unless it’s in a good environment, and the human heart rots if the body isn’t taken care of.  
  
__Admittedly, I don’t know a lot about the body or about our internal organs, but I know that Hitoka Yachi’s heart is a splendid specimen. For a brief moment, I imagine it beating soundly in my hands, imagine the sensation I would feel to literally hold her beating heart in my palms. Of course, it doesn’t. Yachi’s body is in a park by now, on display and ready to be discovered. Maybe she’s already been discovered by a random passerby, someone coming from or going to work. The thought makes me smile, I wish I could have been there to see it.  
  
__But if my mother taught me anything, it’s to be discreet. Don’t get too cocky too early. Pace yourself. So instead, I focus on the task at hand; burying Yachi’s heart in my garden. Everything else I’ve done with precision; the leftover organs and clothing have been burned, the basement cleaned and the gloves safely disposed.  
  
__Not too shabby for a first. A few bumps in the road, but otherwise a success.  
  
  
__Not even a minute after I’m done concealing the heart beneath the last patch of dirt, a ball rolls into my garden. A sweaty, big man follows; hair in a ponytail and bashful expression on his face. He’s got a bit of stubble on his chin and he scampers more than he walks into my garden with muttered apologies. I stare. The ball is right beside me, but I don’t move, forcing the man to instead inch closer and closer. He looks increasingly uncomfortable. As he should, this buffoon nearly ruined everything.  
  
__“Asahi, what’s taking you so lo-” another man emerges - seemingly out of nowhere - and stops abruptly a few feet away. He glances from me, to the ball by my feet, to his friend - Asahi - standing hunched over right by my side. This man is fairer, more dainty-looking. He’s got stylish gray hair and a beauty spot under his eye. He takes in the strange scene in front of him for a moment, and then a smile spreads across his face. Pleasantries tumbles out of his mouth, excuses for his clumsy friend, compliments about my garden. This makes me smile. Oh, if only he knew. He grabs the ball and pats his friend’s back, waves goodbye and drags his taller friend behind him. As soon as their backs are turned I hear the fair man scolding the larger one. They sound like they must be good friends.  
  
__“Stop fussing so much, Suga,” the taller man mutters. Ah. I grin._  
  
Perfect.]

**Author's Note:**

> i initially had a shit ton of notes basically apologizing for my own existence and for every aspect of this fic, but i'm trying not to be so defeatist, so i deleted 'em. if you have some complaints just know that i probably already apologized for them in a note that doesn't exist anymore.


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